Paul's "second" letter to the Corinthians is almost wholly incoherent. Now that I understand why, the issue reminds me of something that happened when I worked on my college's newspaper. We'd written an editorial that we were proud of. It was for the third or fourth issue, and all its predecessors had been milquetoast--conventional opinions supported by cliches of thought. This one was different. It had three paragraphs. The first described the conventional wisdom concerning some campus issue, the second and longest explained what was wrong with the widely accepted view, and the third was a terse and possibly surprising conclusion that nevertheless followed necessarily from the argument of paragraph 2. The space allotted for the editorial was too long for this jewel of brevity, so we filled the column by making two cuts to the galley copy and laying it down with breaks between the paragraphs. So obsessively was this spacing work achieved that no one noticed that the second and third paragraphs switched places. And that's the way the page looked when delivered to the printer--the ringing conclusion as the middle paragraph, followed by a "conclusion" that was actually the logic behind the real conclusion. The editorial filled the space perfectly and made no sense at all.
People suffering from the delusion that our student journalism was some kind of inspired text, if there had been any such people, might have read the editorial over and over again before finally hitting upon the solution to the puzzle of its incoherence: the paragraphs are printed in the wrong order. And so it is that scholarly attention to 2 Corinthians has focused on the highly problematic text, which is beset by a bottomless barrel of trouble that blots out meaning. An imaginary general reader with almost preternatural perceptive powers could theoretically notice that there are layers of difficulty. One reads word by word and sentence by sentence, so the first thing you might notice is that the line of thought and logic often does not proceed in any comprehensible way between small compositional units (as would be the case, also, when you came to the paragraph transitions in the college editorial described above). Though frustrated by the difficulty of extracting any definite meaning, you might still be conscious of a certain ambient tone, which, in the first nine chapters of 2 Corinthians, may be described as friendly, grateful, warm, sometimes perhaps relieved. Then you come to chapter 10 and without warning it's suddenly the opposite of all that. Anger. Acrimony. Sarcasm. You seem to be in the middle of an ugly dispute of indefinite origin. Nothing that had come before prepared the way for this. The only point of consistency is the steady impossibility of grasping any logical connection, line-by-line. So there is incoherence at the micro and macro levels.
The explanation for this is that it's a complete misnomer to conceive of 2 Corinthians as a "second" letter to the church at Corinth. Rather, it's a collection of fragments of many different Pauline compositions set down in confusing order and sometimes interrupted by yet other fragments that weren't even written by Paul. Unlike the student editorial, this biblical text is too much of a muddle to admit of a single elegant solution, but the theory that it's a mishmash of fragments is almost universally acknowledged. The scholarly disagreement is over how many fragments there are, and whether it's possible to fit them together in some plausible fashion, or whether the potentially interlocking parts require other texts that have been lost altogether.
You can just imagine what this means for the experience of an ordinary reader. Lost at sea. It's also true, I think, that the only way to make sense of 2 Corinthians is incompatible with fundamentalist notions concerning how the Bible is an inerrant, infallible transcript of the mind of God.
Since the scholarly consensus will be resisted by fighting fundamentalists, let's just note one detail of the scholars' brief that I think is recommended by its explanatory power. At 2:4 Paul alludes to a certain "painful letter" he has already written and delivered to the Corinthians: "For I wrote you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you." The only other known letter is 1 Corinthians and it does not at all fit this description. But there is extant something that does fit the description--chapters 10, 11, and 12 of 2 Corinthians. That is, the verse from chapter 2 of 2 Corinthians quoted above is from a letter that refers to an earlier letter, a fragment of which is printed out of sequence as chapters 10, 11 and 12 of the very "letter" known as 2 Corinthians. This ingenious conjecture, or insight, associated most closely with the work of Gunther Bornkamm, provides a satisfying solution to several difficulties, including:
Why does 2 Corinthians 2:4 give such a seemingly false account of the prevailing sentiment of I Corinthians? (It doesn't. It's describing a different letter.)
Why do chapters 10 through 12 of 2 Corinthians differ in tone so dramatically from the first nine chapters? (Because chapters 10 through 12 are a fragment, or possibly a reconstructed remnant, of an altogether different letter--the one that is referred to at 2:4.)
The concluding paragraph to the headnote to 2 Corinthians in my Oxford Annotated Bible states:
Because so much of 2 Corinthians is a response to the words and feelings of others, which are not recorded in the letter, it is difficult sometimes to follow the apostle's argument. Its pages preserve much, however, that illuminates Paul's own life, ministry, and the concern which he felt for the churches he had established.
The first sentence seems to me an understatement and perhaps a way to admit the obvious difficulties without diving into textual problems. (Most readers of the Bible are loath to allow that its text is frequently a mess.) The second sentence is also at least rooted in truth and deserves mention. I noted how in 1 Corinthians Paul appears to glower at every Corinthian enthusiasm. What they regarded as "spiritual gifts" he regarded as a falling away from his crucified Christ. Whatever the details of the hot controversy at the center of the last three chapters of 2 Corinthians, it seems clear that there were at Corinth rival apostles who, on account of their visions and revelations and mighty works, claimed for themselves an authority they thought Paul lacked. He reacted not with serenity but vitriol. He seems in some respects a prickly and unpleasant person, not at all serene in his convictions and too quick to take offense. Or we might say, by way of defense or mitigation, that he was insulted by people claiming to have from Christ special powers, since to him the crucifixion was a rebuke to strength and all worldly advantage. Though it's hard to make much sense of 2 Corinthians, it's not hard to believe that the man who wrote most of it also wrote Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galations, &c.
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